Whether you’re freshly divorced and just dipping your toes back into the singles pool, or if you’ve been wading in the deep end for years brandishing your career bachelor moniker, you’d likely be intrigued by a list purporting to lead you by the nose to the best cyber meat markets that $34.99 can buy. You wouldn’t be alone.

I count myself in the first category — I’ve recently found myself singleafter the end of a six-year marriage in which the sexual intimacy had ended about five years earlier. So coming across AskMen’s initial list of hookup websites seemed like just what the doctor ordered — or so I thought.

After a fair share of due diligence and a rather large leap of faith, I threw caution to the wind and threw down $35 toward a membership on one of the list’s featured sites. I got exactly what I bargained for, and failed in my quest to find the golden honey pot at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

I’m not easily deterred, however, and I refused to believe that cyber-sexual bliss did not exist. After all, how could all these sites stay in business if they are nothing more than scams? Phony profiles, sketchy emails and failed promises of casual encounters confirmed my skepticism and raised my curiosity. So I set out on a quest to learn the truth about who’s who in the hookup website business, and took the reins on a comprehensive review. In doing so, I learned that, as with most things in life, there is some good, some bad and certainly some ugly.

What follows are the results of that review, complete with rankings that should help guide you on your own journey toward cyber-sexual bliss.